In the small town of Glimmerbrook, five hours north of Granite Falls, there is a house on Creekshine Way with a history longer than a chain email’s subject line. If walls had ears, these walls would have heard enough life stories to fill a library – but right now, all they would hear is the rumbling of a blue SUV pulling into the driveway.

Car doors slammed as a man got out of the SUV and walked up to the front steps. He fitted a key from his pocket into the lock and turned it, then waved at the car.

With the joyous zzzip! of a hastily unbuckled seatbelt, a boy ran up the driveway towards the man.

“Well, here we are,” the man said.

The boy’s eyes went wide. “It’s so small! Will I have to sleep in the attic with the ghosts?”

The man shook his head. “No, Alex. Besides, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any ghosts in the attic.”

Alex’s brow furrowed. “But Dad, how do you know there aren’t any ghosts? They could be really sneaky ghosts that hide whenever somebody’s looking! Oh no, what if the ghosts are invisible?“

The man laughed and pulled out his phone. “Well, we can check later, okay? Right now we have to decide what kind of pizza we want for dinner.”

As Alex’s eyes went wide at the prospect of pizza and his dad scrolled through the pizzeria’s website, a girl in a black hoodie watched them from a short distance. She’d spent the drive up with her earbuds in, trying to sleep, and still wasn’t in the mood to talk.

“Okay, pepperoni pizza with extra extra pepperoni. What about you, Cass?” The man looked up at the girl.

“I’m not that hungry.”

“Do you want something else? There’s a mexican place that also does takeout, and we passed a chinese restaurant on our way here…”

“I’m not hungry.”

The man looked at Cass, then back at Alex. “Hey, why don’t you go inside and see how it looks? I’ll catch up in a moment.”

As Alex ran off into the house, the man put his hands on Cass’s shoulders. “Hey, if there’s anything I can do, just let me know, okay?”

“I’m fine, dad.”

“Just so you’re sure. I don’t want to…”

“Really. I’m fine.”

The man chewed his lip nervously. “You have the bike we bought?”

“Yeah.”

“I just want to make sure you know you can go out whenever you want. Just text me when you leave.”

“Thanks.” Cass shrugged him off and went into the house.

Cassandra Goth stared into the bathroom mirror. Someone else stared back at her. Would Mom even recognize me right now?

She wanted to hide. She wanted to cry. She wanted to run, to scream, to claw at her skin until it bled, to dig herself into the ground and disappear.

She gave her reflection one last look and went back out to her family.

Alexander and Mortimer were still joking over pizza as Cassandra sat back down at the fold-out table. They’d go furniture shopping the next day, maybe the day after, but for now they were eating on camping equipment.

Cassandra chewed her pizza slowly. It tasted like cardboard. Halfway through her slice, she put it down and went into the bedroom to go set up her camper’s cot.

As she fell asleep, Cassandra felt for the necklace around her neck. It was warm from the heat of her body.

Her last thought before slipping into dreams was to think that it ought to be cold.

Oh, sorry. This is me. Xan. Xaneathmar. The author of this blog. Not a character. Sorry.

This is not going to be a story post. This is going to be a post about Important Things. The past, the present, the future, the furby illuminati – well, not that last one.

You see, it’s 2020. New year! New decade! Wow!

So, I figured I would take the time to look back on this blog. Talk about where it started, what I’m doing, and hint at my super-secret-not-at-all-evil-I-promise plans for the future.

InsaneSims is actually not my first ever sims blog. My first blog used my email address as a domain and hosted only a few posts before I migrated. Alas, those first few posts are lost – but they chronicled the (mis)adventures of the first two generations of the Lujan family, a matriarchal legacy of Insane sims.At that time the Erratic trait was still called Insane, and I planned to write mainly about the Lujans and other Insane sims, so I named my blog “InsaneSims”. That was back in 2016, but I’m still very fond of the name and have no intent of changing it. There are a few other posts from that time that still exist – one, Denorthe, was in part inspired by a school writing project; the other, New Life, was to be the beginning of a story called Red Herrings that I never continued. Shortly after that, my computer ate the Lujan save, and while I recovered it I lost enough progress that I transferred the Lujans to a new world, along with all of their Townies. I added a few characters that I’d come up with in the meantime, some of whom still exist in some form, and planned to give makeovers to all of my townies and ship them out to the Gallery. Twoof those posts still exist, but my grand plans eventually fell through.

My next posts are from early 2017, and were created as part of the Pen Pal Project. My first sim, Dove, was an alien scientist – the next was a vampire named Aylin. Dove has largely disappeared, in part because her save was inadvertently deleted, but not before helping to establish the large, complicated world of the Collab for AAC. Aylin has showed up in a crossover with the amazing CathyTea as part of the third movement of her incredible New World Symphony, mentoring the young runaway Sylvia Zoranto – but there’s much more to Aylin (and her “dark form” Ingram) than I’ve ever revealed on this blog. More recently (in February 2018) we heard from her “ward” Tanvi – but the “Aylinverse” has more characters than just those few. Will we hear more from them? Only time will tell.

There are many “fragments” littered about this site too, such as the two posts of the House story, the scattered letters from Kiana (also a tie-in with the Pen Pal Project), the beginnings of a mysterious project entitled “For Whom the Bell Tolls“, the single post “A Beginning“, and a few more Pen Pal letters from Christy Galea and her ghostly friend Universe. All of them were once planned stories, but whether or not I revisit them depends on whether or not I still like their concepts.

September 2017 also brought the story “Friends“: a completed story in sixteen parts. It had a lot of holes and overall isn’t my best work – but I did finish it! By writing small, simple updates and posting several times a day when the inspiration struck, I was able to crank out a full plot in 10 days. I occasionally get the urge to revisit or redo this story – but we’ll see about that.

Most recently, I’ve put forward several new story beginnings, notable Strange Days and From the Logbook of Erika Oba. I may try to continue FLEO at some point, but Strange Days is officially canceled – I have plans for the characters, but they don’t involve SimsLit. The pilot for Renovatrix also came out, as did an initial post for something I wanted to call “Morning Glow”. Renovatrix is alive and well in my mind, but I don’t think Morning Glow will happen anytime soon.

My favorite posts, however, are “Alice” and “Juntas“. “Alice” was written for the Monthly Simlit Short Story Challenge and “Juntas” was written because I felt like it, but these short, one-shot stories are the ones I consider the best examples of my current writing. Dealing with themes of mental illness, lesbian relationships, and cultural paradigms, these stories provide the best example of where I want to go in the future.

Most recently, of course, I posted the short teaser “Rain“. I’m really excited about this story, and I’m hoping it goes well.

So, that’s the blog as it stands. Where are we going from here?

I’m hoping to post the first part of the story teased in “Rain” very soon! It’s not going to be an easy story – but I hope it will be good.

I have a couple episodes of Renovatrix partially screenshotted. I don’t know when they’ll be ready – but I hope you’ll like them when they come out.

I have a lot of ideas for reworking old stories and fragments to fit with my current writing and playstyle. Red Herrings isn’t dead – neither are House, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or even McKenna and her townies.

I’m going to try and post between 2-3 times a month at the very least this year. I don’t want to ever go completely silent again. With all the ideas I’ve got, it shouldn’t be hard.

Thanks for reading this long post. If you have any thoughts – comment! I’d love to hear from you.

I went to talk to Erwin first. Like I thought, there was more to the picture than what we were told. So glad I can lipread – he’s bugged. I knew they had bugs in the Underground; I didn’t know it was that many. At this point, the Underground exists because it’s permitted. I should tell someone. They deserve to know. What point would it serve? If I tell them their op is a sham, they disbelieve me or panic. Neither will help.

Anyhow, I got something really useful. The sandies are always warning us about the fence around the lab – well, fence don’t work when it got holes! Big holes. I didn’t have to duck.

Apparently they’re very confident in their stupid broken fence. They just leave everything lying around. There wasn’t always useful info – I went through a lot of lunch receipts –

–but sometimes, I found some stuff. A lot of the scientists on the upper levels weren’t doing anything interesting, but there’s still the occasional note mentioning the impact on their work. Interference, noise – that kinda thing. I don’t think anybody who actually knew what was going on downstairs made it, which is good news for me. The sandies are just as stuck as I am.

The biggest piece of evidence for that is the door to the next level – closed. And locked. Even if somebody had an ID card, they don’t have it now. I might even have a leg up here if I can get one before they do.

There is one thing I’m nervous about, though. On my way out, I spotted some plant bulbs. Really big ones.

I suppose that you will look back on this and laugh, sitting in an apartment in San Myshuno, but right now I feel like I drank a bar’s worth of Boiler Rooms! Ugh!

You, of course, will remember it – being awakened from a relatively peaceful slumber by the scratching of tiny claws of the floor. I turned on the lights only to see a little rat scurrying out of a hole in the wall!

Part of me knows, rationally, that the rat needed somewhere to go. It was raining heavily outside; I suppose it had been flooded out. Perhaps I should have pitied it, but I was rather startled.

I put down a trap at the hole as the rat scurried between my feet. Gyehhhh, I think there were two. One of them ran over my foot.

I’m going to have to fix these walls. They’re terribly drafty anyways.

She has insomnia – that’s what she told me that night we met at the bar in the dark hours of the morning. She can’t sleep, so she goes out for a swim. It calms her mind. Usually I roll over and ignore it, but I couldn’t sleep either. Something in the back of my mind told me to get up.

I found her on the pontoon, staring at the wedding arch. Her parents had made it out of fresh palm leaves just that morning. I can’t imagine what she was thinking, really – I never can. There’s an unfathomable sadness in those seaweed eyes sometimes, something I can’t really ever hope to understand. All I can do is be there.

I went up and stood by her side. After a while, she turned to me.

“The sea is beautiful at night.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She looked away, then back at me. For a moment, I thought she was going to say something else – but she didn’t.

We went back to bed. For once, she slept.

The next morning, I was nervous. I’ve never been able to say how I feel in public, not once, so we’d decided to have our ceremony alone. I must have looked silly, walking down that empty isle in my white gown with flowers in my hair, but I didn’t care. All I could think about was the fear, however unreal, that something would go wrong, that she wouldn’t be there.

Then, of course, I saw her standing under the arch. My Alice. She was wearing her mother’s wedding jewelry, the blue-silver necklace with the matching earrings, and a fishtail gown in ocean blue. She had never looked more like a creature of the waves.

We said our vows to each other. There was no one else we needed, no-one we needed to prove our love to. Our witnesses were the sun and the sea and the sky. No-one else mattered.

We invited our parents over to celebrate later, of course. We all sat in our little kitchen, laughing and drinking kava. When they had all left, we stood by the bonfire we had lit and watched the driftwood flames burn blue.

In those fires I saw her at last. Through all the unfathomable depths of her soul a song came shining through, haunting and profound. It had no words, but it said everything it needed to say.

We lay in the sand till dawn, the waves lapping at our feet. Dolphins called in the distance. Somewhere far away, very far and very deep, I thought I heard a heartbeat.

I always used to wonder where Alice goes at night. Does she swim with the dolphins, chattering with them as they race by? I used to think so, but now I know better. She’s looking for tears in the depths of the sea, trying to find the sorrow that will allow her to drown her pain. If she finds what she’s looking for, will the shadow over her dreams pass by? Will the sun finally come up for her, and will she finally be able to dance in the rain?

There are good days and there are bad ones for her. There always will be.

Still, it’s just like she told me that day, as the dawn finally came to wake up the world. With her heart and her eyes and her music and her fire and her soul, she told me what her words could never accomplish.

Hello, my future self. I wish it had occurred to me (us?) to begin writing in this earlier.

As I write, I am sitting at a round table in a little hut near the peak of Mua Pel’am. You probably remember this hut well, but I am still getting used to the rough floors and sparse kitchen.

This is an aerial photo I took from the helicopter that brought me here. Not a large place, even for one sim.

My little kitchen. Adequate. I am restocked weekly by locals who boat out from Ohan’ali Town. So far, they have been very friendly, if not befuddled by my choice to live here.

You, of course, know of our purpose. PHD’s don’t earn themselves, and so I am writing my department head on my old beat-up laptop from a shack on a dormant volcano. Not where I imagined I’d end up, but certainly not a desk job.

The bed, at least, is comfortable enough. The house itself is sparse, but I ask little of it. With any luck, I will not be here long.

I have already spent several hours cataloguing the natural resources, from rock outcroppings to flora. Fauna is few and far between, I am afraid, as the island is somewhat polluted. I asked some locals about it, and they indicated that dive boats pass this way sporadically – perhaps that is the source? In any case, I am here to study, not to clean.

I cannot think of anything more to say, so I will end this entry here. Good luck to you, Dr. Oba.

It was a cold night. Fall, I think, about twelve years after the phone lines went down. The wind was up, but not enough to catch the flag. I didn’t have any laundry drying that night, I think. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t.

Spore levels were normal, and the electricity was on. I had a leftover burger in the cooler. I had some empty pots left over from the Homegrown Initiative but there wasn’t anything in them. You know, because all the plants died from the spores.

I was sleeping… I think. I know it sounds weird, but I’m not sure I was really asleep… I was hearing things, feeling things. There was sun on my skin, air in my face. Everything was bright and beautiful… I could hear someone calling from faraway, calling for me to… I don’t know. I can’t remember. It was a woman, and in the dream I knew that she was my mother.

I woke up when I realized that. My mother had died in the lab explosion all those years ago. I laid in bed for a few moments, but then I got up.

I went over to the corner under the stairs. That was where I kept the, uh – there’s not really a word for this, is there? Light, maybe? Anyways, I went over to the Light and I tried to – speak? – to it. I thought that maybe the dream meant that she would answer.

It was so strange. I didn’t hear any reply, but I felt… my pulse, my Light pulsing, the pulse of the stars, the universe breathing. I felt the tips of my ears, and I felt like if I looked in the mirror I would see myself – really see myself, see Jayme Tovar and not Aurora Brinkley.

The feelings passed. I shook off my daze and went over to my comm rig. Well, yeah, it was illegal, but it was all I had. I put it together myself, actually – took me months; I had to get all the pieces smuggled separately. I don’t know when or why I decided to put one of these together, but once I did I got obsessed. I had just been surviving, keeping myself afloat, and then this – it was hope. Having the machines, having even the chance of hearing something from the outside world – for the first time, there was hope. There was a chance, however small, that I could make contact, that I’d break through. Every night I went into it thinking, tonight will be the night.

That night… I was sitting there at the rig, when suddenly static filled the air. Voices began speaking, a multitude of languages, all saying the same thing: Mother. I tried to hail them, but there was no response. They cut off as abruptly as they had begun, leaving me wondering if I was still dreaming.

I dunno how many hours I spent searching after that – less than usual. I was still thinking about the message. I was really spooked, so I shut the rig down and grabbed my violin.

I wasn’t planning on ever playing again when I bought it. I just knew when I saw it that I needed it. Maybe it needed me too. It looked like a piece of junk, and the seller was asking for a lot of money – but it called to me. We were the same, the violin and me: lost. Out-of-place. I couldn’t refuse it, so I forked over the cash and swore never to touch it. That night, though, I couldn’t help it. I picked it up and it all came back to me – the lessons, the recitals, the feeling of the bow on the strings. The disappointment in my mother’s eyes when I quit.